A portrait itself can be nice, and good looking. But if you like taking photos of people, I’m sure you have experienced the boring light which sometimes appears. Fortunately, our dear friend Photoshop can help us making almost any portrait look better.

The image I used in this tutorial can be downloaded and courtesy of Chris Burfoot.

Step-1:

First off, we want to select all the highlights by pressing Ctrl +  Alt + 4 (Mac: cmd + alt + 4).
Choose Layer (1), New and Layer via Copy. Set the blendingmode in the layer to Screen (2), then the picture will get brighter. This layer only consists of highlights, so it’s especially the bright areas which will get affected by this.

Step-2:

Now we want to blur the skin, but leave the rest of the picture untouched, and filled with details.

Go to Filter (1) and choose Convert for Smart Filters to only apply the effect on selected areas.

Click OK when the box pops up. Go ahead and choose Filter (1), Blur and Gaussian Blur….

Set the Radius to 8 pixels (2), and click OK (3). Your picture may need more or less blur, but i found that 8 fits most pictures. So if you are unsure what looks best, just go with 8.

Step-3:

In this step, we want to remove the blur from the hair. Click one the layermask Smart Filters (1) and choose Brush Tool (2). Use a soft brush (a soft brush is hardness set to either 0, or something very low. I used 0) and set the master diameter to about 200 px (3) and make sure to set the foreground color to black (4).

Paint on the hair. It can be hard to tell where you have painted, but here’s a trick which makes it alot easier. Press Shift + Alt while clicking on the layermask (1). Now your painting becomes red.

Step-4:

Choose the Zoom Tool (1) and zoom in on the persons face. Again, choose the Brush Tool (2), but this time use a smaller diameter, about 50 px (3). What you need to do now is paint on the eyes, nostrals and a little bit around them, the mouth and other details, which you don’t want to get blurred. You also need to paint along the face and neck. If you paint wrong, you can just press the X key to change the foreground color to white, and paint over. When you are done, go ahead and press the Shift + Alt key again on the layermask.

Step-5:

Choose Layer 1 (1), hold the Ctrl-key (Mac: cmd-key) and press the ‘J’ three times to make the picture brighter. It is important to notice that particular move is very individual. On the picture I made for this tutorial, I only copied the layer twice, otherwise it would have been to bright in my opinion.

Click the Create new fill or adjustment  layer (2) and choose Curves… (3). Click half way up the line (4), and three/fourth (5) to lock the highlight and middletones. Next, grab a spot one/fourth up the line (6) and drag this down to make the shadows a little bit darker. Click the layermask (7), choose the Brush Tool (8), and use a big (200px-370px) black (9) brush on the darkest areas of the hair. This is individual, you might like to lighten up the dark areas, but i found that it doesn’t suit all pictures.

Step-6:

At last we want to give the picture more powerful colors, as they sometimes get a little mat.

Click the Create new fill or adjustment layer (1) and choose Hue/Saturation…(2). Make the Saturation (3) to +25 (again, this step can also vary, but +25 is a good universal value). As you can see, the colors can get to powerful some places, so: Click the layermask (4), and choose Brush Tool (5) and black (6) as the foreground color. Set the Opacity to 50% (7), and paint on those places which has too much color.

And that’s it!

Save the picture and experiment on your other portraits!

Credit: photoguides.net